Category Archives: Kids: Public Life

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Letter of Intent Deadline- December 11, 2015

Final Entry Submission Deadline- February 26, 2016

AntiquityNOW (AN) and Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) are announcing a call for entries for the 2016 LegacyQuest International Children’s Film and Video Festival. The Festival is open to young people between the ages of 12 and 15 (6th – 8th grades) in the United States and abroad. It will be held in conjunction with The Archaeology Channel (TAC) International Film and Video Festival, May 11-15, 2016, in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Films must be produced in 2015 and 2016. Continue reading →

Students at the school range from ages 18 months through five years old. The slideshow below illustrates the work of children from three classes. The Lego menorah was created by a student and her father. The children were learning about the story of the Maccabees and the miracle of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, where a small vessel of olive oil burned in the menorah for eight days at the Holy Temple. The pictures of the Hebrew letters Nun, Gimmel, Hey and Shin are translated “Great Miracle Happened There” (in Israel “Here” is substituted). Continue reading →

It is the season of toys! Parents are scouring store shelves for the most popular gadgets and games to wrap up for the holiday season. Today’s most prized playthings may take more batteries than those of the ancients, but our ancestors still knew how to have a good time. Consider the recent findings at a 1,900 year old Roman settlement in Germany. Archaeologists uncovered a board game piece and a die, proving the soldiers who lived there weren’t all work, no play. Read the complete article here.

Further evidence of ancient playtime was discovered in a 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China. The heavily looted site still holds valuable treasures, including pieces from a mysterious board game. “Archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board.”[1] They believe these pieces were used to play a game called “Bo” that hasn’t been played in 1,500 years. Click here to read more about this fascinating find.

Letter of Intent Deadline- December 11, 2015

Final Entry Submission Deadline- February 26, 2016

Not sure how to get started with your LegacyQuest video submission? We’re here to help! First, check out our page called Tips for Making a Video for LegacyQuest. Next, think about what interest and excites you. Do you like art, science, cooking, video games, reading…? Whatever your passion, there’s a fascinating link to the past that you can explore. Feel free to contact us for help getting inspired to make the best video ever!

View our invitational video below and visit our webpage for details about the festival and how your students can get involved!

The lurid headlines grab our attention. Another brutal civil war. A wave of sickness claiming a country’s most vulnerable. Corrupt governments siphoning off a nation’s wealth and relegating its people to poverty and ignorance. Generations of tomorrow’s children doomed before they are born.

It sometimes seems so hopeless to think that anything can salvage humanity when for thousands of years we’ve done our best to destroy ourselves and the planet that we claim as home. But human beings are tenacious, and hope continues to weave its tendrils into our efforts, no matter how daunting the circumstance. This is why AntiquityNOW launched LegacyQuest. It is our own small way of seeking a better future by understanding and preserving the past. A past that through its archaeological and historical evidence both condemns and exalts the human condition. A past from which we can learn the foibles and frailties of human endeavor and always hope for a better, more harmonious, tolerant and free world. We dedicate LegacyQuest to that aspiration by giving young people a new way of looking at the world around them. And in that new vision, we at AntiquityNOW hope to inspire future generations to realize we are what our ancestors wrought, and that what we do today influences all the tomorrow to come.

Update! This post was originally published on July 23rd, 2013. In the post below we explore the ancient history of rock art and how we’re still using pictograms to communicate today. Recently, ancient petroglyphs have been back in the news with the discovery of an ancient Aboriginal site in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Researchers say the site is tens of thousands of years old and has probably been dismissed by locals as graffiti.[1] Actually, it is kind of like ancient graffiti and it helps us see into the past and get a glimpse of what life was like for the ancient people living in the area. The art is made up of hand stencils of things that were a part of everyday life, such as “eels, a spearhead and a crescent-shaped moon.”[2] The images are a particularly advanced form of aboriginal hand stencils in which numerous hands combine to form a particular shape.[3] There’s a waterhole nearby and the petroglyphs are on a rock overhang so the artists were probably living in this spot, using the rock for shelter and fishing out of the waterhole. Because of the size of the hands, researchers have concluded that this site was created by women and children.[4]Continue reading →

A cuneiform tablet similar to the ones on display in the Bible Lands Museum.

Have you ever sat down at the end of a long day and written in your diary? Or maybe you just updated your Facebook status and shared what you ate for dinner or how you were feeling after a difficult day at school. What if ancient people from thousands of years ago had done the same thing? We could learn so much about the way people lived, how they felt, what they did. These are the kinds of things archaeologists get to study when they are lucky enough to find written records and testimonies from ancient times. Continue reading →

An ancient Viking rune symbolizing fertility and new beginnings. In modern times, it is often used as a symbol for the saying “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

In Part I, we discovered how proverbs, sayings that carry a message or truth, seem to be a part of every culture going back millennia. In the oral tradition, before writing could delve deeply into the world of ideas, societies needed ways to instruct people as to how they had to behave. Proverbs arose as an effective way to do just that. Their wise and often witty words and images embodied the values of a culture. And while cultural values can be quite complex, proverbs were popular because they conveyed that idea, that value, that moral in a distinctive and memorable way. Continue reading →

Every culture has a story to tell, and that story is told in many ways. Artifacts, legal records, letters, journals, art, music, dress, even the detritus of daily life uncover the ways of a people. Values and mores are realized through rituals, religions, oral and written histories, monuments and palaces, and many more touchstones of culture. In particular, language and the expressive arts have produced some remarkable observations of lives lived long ago. Continue reading →

UPDATE! This post was originally published on September 3rd, 2013. Right now an ancient volcano in Hawaii is causing a lot of trouble for residents. The Kilauea Volcano, located on the Big Island of Hawaii, is actually its youngest volcano, but that doesn’t mean it’s a baby by any stretch of the imagination. It is over 300,000 years old and has been constantly active since prehistoric times. It is one of the world’s most active volcanos and features prominently in many Polynesian legends, including the story of Pele, a volcanic goddess who is said to live in the Kilauea crater.[1] There is even archaeological evidence of the eruptions that have taken place since antiquity. Footprints frozen in time leave reminders of those who have lost their lives to this powerful force of nature.[2]Continue reading →